Audience at Play: An Inquiry into the Song Kolaveri Di

The discourse in communication studies has looked at audiences as active seekers of pleasure through communicative play. This perspective has been talked about extensively by William Stephenson (1988) through his play theory of mass communication. Stephenson refutes Freud who considered play to be an unconscious, passive and an escapist defence mechanism. This paper furthers this understanding of play in the present day of digitization and virtual media technologies. The study proposes that the users of the Internet (virtual audiences) get actively co-opted into the creation and recreation of media content through play. Participative play on the Internet can be equated to what Caillois (2001) has described as Paideia (primitive, pure play of carefree gaiety). Paideia in its new Internet avatar may manifest itself in the form of shares and likes, posts and reposts, comments and recommendations on content sharing and social networking sites. This carefree act of pure play can be attributed to the absence of a proper regulatory framework on social interactions in the cyberspace which in turn makes the play elusive and the players’ (audience) behaviour very unpredictable.